They were in a large Western city.  Behind the curtain their retiring manners, their exquisite cleanliness, their grave and gentle politeness, made them favourites with the working forces of the theatre, while before the curtain the brilliant, graceful precision with which they carried out their difficult, often dangerous, performance won them the high favour of the public.

On that special day the matinee was largely attended, the theatre being filled, even to the upper circles, as at night.  Smilingly the audience had watched the movements of the miniature men and women in their handsome native costumes, and with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” had seen them emerge from those robes, already arrayed for acrobatic work, in suits of black silk tights with trunks and shoulder and wrist trimmings of red velvet fairly stiffened with gold embroideries; and then came the act the people liked best, because it contained the element of danger, because in its performance a young girl and a little lad smilingly risked life and limb to entertain them.

The two young things had climbed like cats up to the swinging bars, high up, where the heat had risen from a thousand gas lights, and the blood thundered in their ears, and the pulses on their temples beat like hammers.  So high, that looking down through the quivering, bluish mist, the upturned faces of the people merged together and became like the waters of a pale, wide pool.  Their work was well advanced.  With clocklike precision they had obeyed, ever-smilingly obeyed, the orders conveyed to them by the sharp tap of the fan their trainer held, though to the audience the two young forms glittering in black and scarlet and gold, poising and fluttering there, were merely playing in midair like a pair of tropical birds.

They were beginning their great feat, in which danger was so evident that women often cried out in terror and some covered their eyes and would not look at all—­the music even had sunken to a sort of tremor of fear.  They were for the moment hanging head downward from their separate bars, when across the stillness came the ominous sound of cracking, splintering wood; afterward it was known that the rung of a chair in an upper private box had broken, but then,—­but then! the sound was close to the swaying girl’s ear!

Believing it was her bar that was breaking, her strained nerves tore free from all control!  Driven by fear, she made a mad leap out into space, reaching frantically for the little brown hands that a half second later would have been ready for her, with life and safety in their tenacious grasp.

To those who do their work in space and from high places, the distance between life and death, between time and eternity, is often measured by half seconds.  Little Omassa had leaped too soon, the small brown hands with power to save were not extended.  She grasped the empty air, gave a despairing cry, and as she whirled downward, had barely time to realize that the sun had gone black out in the sky, and that the world with its shrieking millions was thundering to its end, when the awful crash came.